Email Lists - Email Marketing Run Amok? (It Can Be Bad For Your Business)
Even if you have no interest in Internet marketing and don't possess a company (perhaps you don't even know what that's), if you have e-mail, you've experienced the more ugly side. You've probably even seen the advertisements for email address lists offering thousands-or even millions-of email addresses for pocket change.
You will rest assured of just one thing: if the price is not expensive, these aren't opt-in lists. Instead, these enormous lists are loaded with “harvested” email addresses. They're comparable to your list of street addresses chosen from your telephone book.
There's no phone book for email addresses, so where do these cheapo lists come from? Mainly, the addresses are picked from web logs, membership or student lists, newsgroups, message boards, forums, along with other locations where folks gather to swap advice. They do not know their addresses sold on the open market and are being gathered up. And they surely didn't request to have their inboxes polluted with spam.
Harvesting email addresses is legal. But it's widely considered unethical. You pay a fine or won't go to jail. Nevertheless, you might hurt your business, possibly irreparably. The possible outcomes for breaking the unwritten rule about no email harvesting range to having your business from losing your ISP blacklisted to losing your domain name.